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„I am happy to say my personal flame is now burning brighter than it ever has. My kids are now convinced I will never retire. They are certain that one day a lifeless but smiling old man will be carried out of the place that brought joy to himself, his business partners, his team, and now the world. The joy I've found is what I hope to reveal in our conversation through this book. I don't assume what worked for me will work for you, but I do want to inspire you…“ 1/

„… as you contemplate what an intentional culture of joy could look like in your world.“ /2

„In short, they tested Extreme Programming in the extreme, adapting all the techniques that Gyl and most of his colleagues had dismissed out of hand. About three weeks into this experiment, Clare stopped me in the parking lot and asked if I was still going to pay him to work there. "What do you mean?" I asked. "I am having so much fun, it doesn't feel like work anvmore." he replied. "I'm not sure you should pay me." Just a few short weeks before this experiment, Clare had asked me to be a…“ 1/

„… reference in his job search, as he had decided to leave the company. Clearly, with this new experiment, we had hit pay dirt. "Blood, mayhem, murder" on one side. "I will work for you for free" on the other side. I was not getting lukewarm reactions. This was an M-curve reaction: extreme feelings on either side of the issue. I've come to realize that, in the face of a significant change initiative, emotional reactions…“ 2/

„… fitting a standard bell curve will likely never create lasting change. You need the energy from the edges, not the middle.“ /3

„What I have learned is that pairing is one of the most potent managerial tools I have ever discovered because of all the traditional problems it helps solve. Pairing fosters a learning system, builds relationships, eliminates towers of knowledge, simplifies onboarding of new people, and flushes out performance issues.“

„The pairs teach and question one another, expanding on one another's knowledge in the process. If we do this for a few weeks, changing the pairs every week, before we know it half of our team is filled with budding experts and supportive teachers.“

„We've found that people are more likely to engage in a casual, pop-up conversation with others whom they've previously paired with for forty hours. This time spent together dispels a lot of misconceptions about one's fellow teammates. Once you spend forty hours in conversation with another human being, you are going to get to know that person in a deeper way than a general impression could ever accomplish.“

„Working in pairs also provides an emotional safety net for our employees. As much as they are stretching the boundaries of what they know, they are also testing the edges of what is "safe" in a work environment. When a new technology or process or domain is introduced, there's always the prospect of fear creeping in, a natural human response to the unknown.“

„A few weeks after one of our programmers joined Menlo, straight out of college, she received a phone call at home from one of her upset friends. They lamented that she wasn't answering their texts and their instant messages at work the way other friends were. "I can't," she said. "I'm working. I'd be letting my pair partner down." Visitors sometimes ask us how we can absorb the loss of productivity that pairing reresents. Of course, there is no real loss, but tremendous gains as learning…“ 1/

„… goes faster. Stuck people are quickly unstuck when their partner suggests a different approach. Quality soars with four eagle eyes on the screen, and we achieve a superior result in a shorter amount of time. One company we competed with for years (and now partner with as a client) claimed that, during the competitive period, they outspent us ten to one. They ultimately threw in the towel because we just got more done in the same amount of time.“ /2

„We believe that relying on deep expertise stifles innovation. We may need to learn a new programming language or software tool for a client's project; our organization is built to handle this. We don't miss a beat when learning opportunities arise. We buy a book, crack it open, start to work, and learn simultaneously. One of our clients, a local book manufacturer, was shocked to see that, within weeks, our team had a deeper end-to-end understanding of his business than any individual…“ 1/

„… employee had within his decades-old company. We have a well-developed curiosity that allows us to see things that experts can easily overlook. This is where our most serious learning occurs.“ /2

„This style of team organization is prevalent in many industries and so commonly accepted that management refuses to acknowledge the risk of putting all its knowledge eggs in one brain basket. It would be as silly as a bank manager being the only one with the combination to the vault. But it's worse. At least bank vaults can be drilled open and the contents retrieved. When your tower of knowledge leaves, he takes too much with him that can't be re-created or taken back. There…“ 1/

„… is often a desperate attempt to transfer decades of knowledge in the last two weeks of a tower's employ. […] It may seem amusing or trite, but so many industries take just that type of risk, particularly those that create intellectual property or those that establish intricate practices based on the personal knowledge and experience of one individual.“ /2

„Companies go to unbelievable extremes to protect and coddle their towers of knowledge. One company had such a serious problem with this scenario that they had roped off the software code of a part of their mission-critical system that only their Dave knew. Dave had taken another job and was no longer working for the company, but the rest of the team was instructed to never, ever change Dave's code. No one could make sense of Dave's code, and if someone broke it, no one…“ 1/

„… would ever be able to figure out how to fix it. I caught up with one of this company's executives a few years later and asked how it was going. Had they ever allowed people to work with Dave's code? Did they still prevent their current employees from touching this roped-off area? The executives were delighted to inform me that their problem had been solved: their Dave had returned to work for them. They got lucky. You can't assume that your Dave, would ever come back.“ /2

„In a paired environment that switches the pairs regularly, this knowledge hoarding just isn't even a possibility. Pairing, by its nature, eliminates knowledge hoarding. We switch pairs weekly because doing so knocks down towers of knowledge each and every week. There is no one person on our team who is the only one to understand a piece of the system or the subtleties of a particular algorithm. The benefit to the team members is also quite clear. In twelve…“ 1/

„… years we've never had to deny a request for time off. Without towers of knowledge, our people are under pressure to perform well at work - but not because they're the only ones who can do a given job.“ /2

„Pairing is the atomic element of our learning organization. It produces a joy in learning that most of us haven't experienced in years, perhaps since elementary school, when everything was new and all we had to do was absorb it.“